The Garden, You, and I eBook

Last evening, in the working out of these schemes,
we found that we were really travelling on lines parallel
with your needs, and so in due course you shall have
Evan’s prescription and design for A Simple Rose
Garden (if it isn’t simple enough, you can begin
with half, as the proportions will be the same), while
I now send you my plans for an inexpensive midsummer
garden, which will be useful to you only as a part
of the whole chain, but for which Evan has a separate
need.

Over at East Meadow, a suburb of Bridgeton that lies
toward the shore and is therefore attractive to summer
people, a friend of Evan’s has put up a dozen
tasteful, but inexpensive, Colonial cottages, and Evan
has planned the grounds that surround them, about
an acre being allotted to each house, for lawn and
garden of summer vegetables, though no arbitrary boundaries
separate the plots. The houses are intended for
people of refined taste and moderate means who, only
being able to leave town during the school vacation,
from middle June to late September, yet desire to
have a bit of garden to tend and to have flowers about
them other than the decorative but limited piazza
boxes or row of geraniums around the porch.

The vegetable gardens consist of four squares, conveniently
intersected by paths, these squares to be edged by
annuals or bulbs of rapid growth, things that, planted
in May, will begin to be interesting when the tenants
come a month later.

But here am I, on the verge of rushing into another
theme, without having expressed our disappointment
that you cannot bear us company this summer, yet I
must say that the edge of regret is somewhat dulled
by my interest in the progress and result of your garden
vacation, which to us at least is a perfectly unique
idea, and quite worthy of the inventive genius of
The Man from Everywhere.

Plainly do I see by the scope of this same letter
of yours that the records of The Garden, You, and
I, instead of being a confection of undistinguishable
ingredients blended by a chef of artistic soul, will
be a home-made strawberry shortcake, for which I am
to furnish the necessary but uninspired crust, while
you will supply the filling of fragrant berries.

With the beginning of your vacation begin my questions
domestic that threaten to overbalance your questions
horticultural. If the Infant should wail at night,
do you expect to stay quietly out “in camp”
and not steal on tiptoe to the house, and at least
peep in at the window? Also, you have put a match-making
thought in a head swept clean of all such clinging
cobwebs since Sukey Crandon married Carthy Latham and,
turning their backs on his ranch experiment, they decided
to settle near the Bradfords at the Ridge, where presently
there will be another garden growing. If you
have no one either in the family or neighbourhood likely
to attract The Man from Everywhere, why may
we not have him? Jane Crandon is quite unexpectedly
bright, as frank as society allows, this being one
of his requirements, besides having grown very pretty
since she has virtually become daughter to Mrs. Jenks-Smith
and had sufficient material in her gowns to allow
her chest to develop.